Google Analytics Premium- Showing the value of data

The interwebs are a-buzz today with the announcement by Google that there is now a Premium, paid version of their web analytics product.

Google Analytics premium offers a number of key advantages. The service guarantees in the form of SLAs, the more formalised arrangements with certified partners for support, attribution analytics, but perhaps most importantly, more data and less sampling.

Google Analytics, for a very long time, as been a remarkably powerful tool, particularly for its price. Free. Of course, any company who uses Google Analytics seriously knows it’s not really free. True they are not paying for the tool itself, but with a number of internal and external resources working hard to keep it all functioning, and to get the data to the people that need it when they need it the cost is significant.

But when Google announced the new premium offering, what is interesting is that the key differentiation is data volume. Certainly, some in large enterprises will be comforted by the new SLAs, or the support agreements with partners or Google, but in the end, the big difference is in the data. In general, I note a trend- everything in the premium is way bigger (ten times or more) than the free version.

More data. Exact data with less sampling.

In any market, prices are important, and give a clear signal on regarding the value of things. Google, in offering this new premium service, focused on data, and priced at $150k a year, has clearly sent a signal about the value of data. It’s not free, because the big data is important.

Data is valuable. Hats off to Google for always knowing this. Google premium is an exciting evolution in the analytics industry. Many large companies currently use both the free version of Google Analytics and some other paid tool. My prediction is that in many cases, even at $150k a year for Google Analytics Premium, the other paid tool is going to start to look expensive, and in a lot of cases, companies will make a switch.

James is the founder of nModal Solutions, the creator of the Analytics Canvas tools. nModal's vision is to bring an entire new class of visual, flexible tools to web analytics and social media analysis. You can find him on Google+.